the 'a' word

Things have taken a graphic turn.  After spending nearly a week cutting out shapes of telegraph poles like the paper dolls I used to cut out as a child, I decided to draw and rub over them.  This was partly for ease of replication of the images but also because telegraph poles do have generic shapes and components, even though these are arranged differently on nearly every pole I look at.


The curves suggested by some of the photographs I took are brilliant - completely random but beautiful in how they overlap and interconnect.  I cropped some of the sections and blew them up using the photocopier and then drew them without the poles.  They remind me of ribcages, scorpions and protective wire helmets.

The straight lines too can't be ignored - the way the power lines slice through the tops of urban streets or cut across the countryside

I made most of the rubbings using oil pastel which gives a good, grainy, dirty texture.  Pencil was just too subtle for my brash tastes and doesn't really suit the theme of stark, overpowering telegraph poles.

The image above is more or less where I got up to this week. I'm quite pleased with the progress but need to incorporate these experiments with my ideas of the urban environment.  Like I wrote on the last post, I'm warming to the urban environment and might even admit that some of these telegraph poles are quite beautiful in their own right.  I don't think I'll be painting them in pink any time soon however ...